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Johnson’s situation might seem to be inherently precarious. He was a free man of color living in the heart of the slave country. But that wasn’t in itself all that unusual. Tens of thousands of free people of color lived in the lower valley. There were two hundred living in Natchez alone, out of a total population of three thousand. Most of the women were domestic servants; the men were farmers, or small-time craftsmen—typically coopers or smiths—or in Johnson’s trade, barbering. Johnson stood out only because he was so successful. He owned several pieces of land and he also owned many slaves. (This was also not unusual—any prosperous man of color would as a matter of course be a slave owner.) He did so well that he was able to buy the shabby clapboard building where he had his barbershop, tear it down, and replace it with a sturdy three-story building with a brick façade. It cost three thousand dollars, a fortune in those days, but he paid for it out of his own pocket. He opened a second shop around the corner from the first, in the lobby of an upscale hotel, and eventually a third shop in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. This shop was the result of yet another civic campaign to clean up Natchez-Under-the-Hill by encouraging respectable businesses to move in. Johnson was one of the first businessmen the campaign approached.

Johnson was such a successful man because he was smart, civil, discreet, and unrelentingly cautious. His diary wasn’t a vehicle for self-expression or self-examination, but a way of keeping everything in his life precisely on track. The lurid violence he reported in the outside world was a kind of dark counterpoint to his abiding interest: the careful outlay of petty cash. The diary records the unending parade of odd objects he had to purchase for his barbershops—razors and razor straps, roller towels and hand towels, shaving brushes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, hat brushes. He bought bottles of lemon water, orange water, lavender water, and rose water; his shops stocked expensive Macassar oil and cheap bear’s oil, imported cologne and exotic pomades and Crème de Perse and Winship’s Camphor Soap. He also recorded all manner of one-off purchases that sound almost like impulse buys: a barrel of sweet potatoes for $3.00; a keg of nails for shingles for $8.00; $8.50 for a satin vest and a pair of pants. He was always hungry for bargains—even when it’s hard to imagine what use he could have made of them. One time he recorded splitting with a neighbor the cost of a cask of bacon. The neighbor paid $13.00 and Johnson paid $16.25. Since bacon sold in bulk for around 3.25 cents a pound, that means the cask held almost nine hundred pounds.

The larger issues of his life ultimately came down to the same kind of accounting. When he rebuilt his barbershop, he decided to lay out extra money to add a bathhouse. It was an unusually risky move for him, because bathing had never been popular on the frontier—even the most respectable men avoided immersing themselves in water, which was thought to be unhealthy, and instead doused themselves with perfume and cologne (which is why Johnson did such a brisk business in both). But in the 1830s hot baths were becoming something of a fad, prompted by a popular form of alternative medicine known as Thompsonism. Its practitioners claimed to cure all kinds of diseases by means of saunas and sweat-boxes—Thompsonians were known as steam doctors. Johnson himself had no opinion on whether steam medicine actually worked; he just made a bet on its popularity, and it paid off. The bathhouse took in a small but steady stream of customers, giving Johnson a pleasant and consistent income even in hard times.

That was the one self-revelation the diary discloses: Johnson was secretly a bit of a gambler. He didn’t much like playing cards, and he was indifferent to roulette and other games of chance. But he did dearly love racing—horse racing in particular. He was a regular for decades at the local tracks, and he believed he knew horses well. But then he’d bet